“If we don’t have a euro on the blockchain, banks will use the dollar because it’s there, it’s available and it has a lot of liquidity,” Sell told CoinDesk. Rather than each bank issuing its own euro stablecoin, Qivalis encourages them to work together within a single shared network.
Sell said Qivalis was not trying to compete directly with USDC. Its aim is to provide European banks, businesses and payment companies with a regulated alternative to the euro as tokenized finance grows. This would allow institutions to settle in euros rather than converting their assets into dollars and vice versa.
As more banks join, the consortium also benefits from the same network effects that led to the adoption of USDC. “The more banks we have in the consortium, the better. Our network has stronger network effects,” Sell said.
Investing in infrastructure
Agant’s MacKenzie said he sees the same trend emerging in the UK
Banks are no longer focused solely on digital assets, he said. Instead, they are investing in the infrastructure needed to connect stablecoins to traditional finance for payments, treasury operations, and settlements. Companies generally prefer to settle their obligations in their own currency, he explained, rather than converting them into U.S. dollars first.
This could be the impetus for the introduction of non-dollar stablecoins, such as Société Générale’s EUR CoinVertible (EURCV), Crédit Agricole’s EURXT, and the impending Qivalis offering. But existing is insufficient. It is how the bank deploys the stablecoin to its customers that will determine its success.
